Thursday, November 29, 2007

Rudy's real terrorist connections

By Libby

I don't remember where I picked this up today but it seems not to have received enough attention in the wake of the all the revelations about the municpal funds Giuliani spent on his mistress. That seems small to me in comparison to his real connection to 9/11. He's friends with the planners.

Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city's skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. Although a member of the emir's own royal family had harbored the man who would later be identified as the mastermind of the attack—a man named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials, KSM—al-Thani rushed to New York in its aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, principally to the families of its victims. Rudy Giuliani, apparently unaware of what the FBI and CIA had long known about Qatari links to Al Qaeda, appeared on CNN with al-Thani that night and vouched for the emir when Larry King asked the mayor: "You are a friend of his, are you not?" [...]

But there was another reason to think twice about accepting al-Thani's generosity that Giuliani had to have been aware of, even as he heaped praise on the emir. Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network based in Qatar (pronounced "Cutter"), had been all but created by al-Thani, who was its largest shareholder. The Bush administration was so upset with the coverage of Osama bin Laden's pronouncements and the U.S. threats to bomb Afghanistan that Secretary of State Colin Powell met the emir just hours before Giuliani's on-air endorsement and asked him to tone down the state-subsidized channel's Islamist footage and rhetoric.

Yes that would be the same Al Jazeera that the fringers tell me is the mouthpiece of jihadists and the very voice of AQ, spreading lies and demoralizing our troops. So were's the outrage? Why hasn't the blog mob seized on this damning connection and investigated every corner of Mr. Giuliani's life? I would have expected to know the square footage of his house and the composition of his kitchen counters by now.

And how could our relentless citizen journalists failed to turn up this explosive item on Rudy's current dealings?

The contradictory and stunning reality is that Giuliani Partners, the consulting company that has made Giuliani rich, feasts at the Qatar trough, doing business with the ministry run by the very member of the royal family identified in news and government reports as having concealed KSM—the terrorist mastermind who wired funds from Qatar to his nephew Ramzi Yousef prior to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and who also sold the idea of a plane attack on the towers to Osama bin Laden—on his Qatar farm in the mid-1990s.

That would be the guy who was -- you know -- actually responsible for the 9/11 attacks as opposed to a guy who takes pictures for a living or some poor grunt making up a war story. We're talking about a guy who is so evil that he's used to excuse waterboarding. So why are our keyboard warriors giving Rudy a pass on this?

That's a rhetorical question. I think we can all guess the answer to that. The better question would be why isn't our establishment media reporting it? Isn't that what 'real' journalists are supposed to do?